Powermac G4- Weird boot-up issues?

Discussion in 'PowerPC Macs' started by Qwertyfish11, Jan 3, 2012.

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  1. Qwertyfish11, Jan 3, 2012

    Qwertyfish11 macrumors newbie

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    Hey all, so I got a G4 Quicksilver and can't wait to use it, but I'm having some weird issues. It's not "booting up" properly.
    Here's what's happening: I press the power button, and it glows, but fades out if I let go of it. The Power supply fans are both on, but not the small black one. The red light on the mobo lights up, and that's it. It's stuck in this weird half-on state until I unplug the power cable. It doesn't send anything to the monitor, the hard drives don't spin up, no beeps or other noises that might indicate it was on, just a low hum from the fans.

    Reading around the Internet, I've diagnosed it as a dead pram battery, but I just wanted to verify with some people on the forums to make sure.
    So, what do you guys think?
     
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  2. Plymouthbreezer, Jan 4, 2012

    Plymouthbreezer macrumors 601

    Plymouthbreezer

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    Massachusetts
    #2
    With G4 Towers, and some of the most common issues are in fact the PRAM battery, bad RAM, or the power supplies. Since you know the power works, it seems to suggest PRAM.

    Or bad/weird/incompatible memory: If you have a few extra sticks of good memory, plug those in and see what happens. Over the years, I saw some things that never made any sense, like RAM working in one model but not another. Thankfully, these towers are super easy to work on!

    ----------

    Also, it's worth verifying that your graphics card is in working order... If the unit is newly acquired, perhaps it was junked for a bunch of reasons, including bad graphics / mobo.
     
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  3. Qwertyfish11, Jan 4, 2012

    Qwertyfish11 thread starter macrumors newbie

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    I don't think it's the graphics, I took the card put and tried a boot up, and it exhibited the same symptoms.
    It's good to know I'm not shooting in the dark. I'll have to try the memory for sure though.
     
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  4. 666sheep, Jan 4, 2012

    666sheep macrumors 68040

    666sheep

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    #4
    Start from PMU reset.
     
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  5. Qwertyfish11, Jan 4, 2012

    Qwertyfish11 thread starter macrumors newbie

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    Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

    How do I do that?
     
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